“We tried you on your cell but you didn’t pick up so we got a little worried since we didn’t know where your appointment was and we tried calling Leon at work … ”

Terry McMillan has turned into a romance novelist with a sense of humor and that would be okay except for a few things and one is that in The Interruption of Everything (Signet) she strings together lots of independent clauses without punctuation the way Nobel laureates like Ernest Hemingway do and also her characters sometimes say things like “Dang” and “Whoa” that for some reason remind you of a Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western although maybe this is because we just saw him at the Academy Awards. Plus she sets up a subplot that goes nowhere involving her perimenopausal heroine’s former soul mate who just happens to move move nearby after she decides to leave her husband and would your favorite romance novelist do that?

Writing sample:
“We tried you on your cell but you didn’t pick up so we got a little worried since we didn’t know where your appointment was and we tried calling Leon at work but his assistant said he left early to pick up his son at the airport and against our better judgment we tried your house and Hail Mary Full of Grace answered and after she deposed us, I asked if she knew your doctor’s number and she said she had to think for a few minutes and while she was thinking I started thinking who else we could call and that’s when I remembered your GYN’s name was a hotel: Hilton!” Where have all the commas gone? The sentence reads like the winner of a Bad Hemingway Parody Contest.